Woman murdered as she tries to prevent her infant from being kidnapped

In the Woodlands, a planned community near Houston, Kala Golden Schuchardt was getting into her pickup with her three day old baby son after a visit to the pediatrician when a black woman leaped out of a nearby Lexus sedan and grabbed the baby from its seat. As Schuchardt screamed, “My baby, my baby,” the woman shot her several times in the chest. She then got back in the Lexus, in which there was a man sitting, and started to drive away. Schuchardt tried to stop the car and she was run over. She died later in the hospital. The baby was recovered unharmed a few hours later and the kidnapper, Verna McClain, was arrested.

The earlier version of this story at the Houston Chronicle mentioned at the very end that the suspect was “African-American.” The updated version, posted after McClain was arrested and photos of her were posted, does not mention her race. It must have been a relief to the Chronicle, now that there was a silent photo to provide the information that the murderer is black, not to have to say it themselves.

Kala Golden Schuchardt and her child

Verna McClain

White people are in danger from black people all across this country, but this fact is never stated by the media or by any public person. So the black community is under no pressure to put the lid on the anti-white hatred and violence, and white people are not put on guard to be more cautious around blacks, but instead keep delivering themselves into the maw of death. John Derbyshire plainly spoke of the intense animus toward whites that is harbored by some blacks and that a large number of blacks countenance, of the black violence against whites, and of the need for whites to be on guard toward blacks, and National Review dismissed him for it.

Of course there is no mention in the media that the extremely depraved and violent behavior of McClain is not just a one-off thing, but a constant in the black community—an instant readiness to engage in extreme violence that is shown by no other group except blacks.

Verna McClain has told the police that she was looking for a baby to kidnap, though she hadn’t targeted Schuchardt’s baby specifically. The article does not tell us if McClain was looking for a white baby. It does tell us, however, that Schuchardt was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She had just taken her child to a pediatrician, and that’s being “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

- end of initial entry -

Beth M. writes:

In the ’80s/’90s one of my cousins lived in The Woodlands, and at that time it was a very nice place. Maybe it has gone downhill, but unless the area has “gone ghetto,” I don’t think the mother deliberately put herself at risk by taking the baby to the pediatrician in that neighborhood. [LA replies: I wasn’t suggesting she had. This may be an instance in which there was no reasonable way for the woman to protect herself, other than carrying a gun.]

Texas still executes people, so what is fascinating to me is that this is another example of Black Criminal Stupidity. This woman KIDNAPS an infant in broad daylight in a commercial area that probably has security cameras, and certainly has continuous foot traffic, and then OPENS FIRE on the baby’s mother. Even if the baby’s mother had not pursued McClain and McClain had made a clean getaway from the scene of the crime, she still would have been arrested within 72 hours.

You see Black Criminal Stupidity all the time. They carjack and murder somebody, and then they drive the victim’s car to their own house or apartment, and park it in PLAIN VIEW of the police and public. Within 24 hours of the crime, they are under arrest. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that every cop in the jurisdiction will be looking for the murder victim’s missing vehicle.

LA writes:

Here is another photo of Verna McClain that has been posted in the news media. The woman here looks so different from the relatively together-looking woman in the first photo that I tend to believe the first photo is not Verna McClain.

David B. writes:

As a trial junkie, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen what Beth M. describes as Black Criminal Stupidity—driving the victim’s car to their own house or apartment and parking it in plain view.

This very thing happened in the recent Tulsa murders of Bob and Nancy Strait and the murders last year of Carissa Horton and her boyfriend, Ethan Nichols. It also took place in the Wichita Massacre in 2000. I can name still more instances.

Another standard practice is to give a murdered white woman’s posessions to a girlfriend or sometimes, the killer’s mother. In a case I saw on Forensic Files, a stolen item was pawned by the girl friend, resulting in the case being solved.

Not exactly the white master criminals you see on a typical Law & Order episode.

Kevin V. writes:

Your reader’s comment regarding the stupidity of many of these criminals, who seem to be committing their crimes without any thought as to the consequences or getting caught, really stuck a nerve with me. When I was in law school, I had the opportunity to clerk between my first and second year at my state’s Department of Justice, in a section dealing with criminal appeals. I took four life-long lessons away from that intense three-month experience.

First, the vast majority of criminals are indeed deeply stupid. This is why shocking news stories finding the a large percentage of prisoners are technically retarded and/or developmentally disabled don’t surprise me and why the strong movement in legal circles to move such cases away from the criminal realm and into the medical realm concerns me. Almost all exhibit a very low ability to foresee the likely consequences of their actions. And nearly all talk themselves into jail even after they have been helpfully told that they don’t have to speak at all.

Second, most criminals show a shocking inability to understand that there will be authorities looking for them. The only capital case I was exposed to involved two poor German girls of college age who had decided to hitch-hike the American West, something that would present no real issues in Germany or Austria. Two young, very drunk, white men saw these two gorgeous young women on the side of the highway, picked them up, forced them into a nearby forest clearing, raped them and then strangled both. We know this is what happened, because the two proceeded to their hometown’s watering hole, where they quite loudly and with details entertained the crowd with what they had done. A patron excused himself, called the sheriff and they were arrested in under two hours from the time of the crime. They are both now on death row.

Third, I learned that nearly all child sexual abuse that reaches criminal proceedings involve, at some point, “Mother’s live-in boyfriend.”

Fourth, I learned that I have no stomach for such a vile parade of useless, evil, senseless people. So, in that sense, I suppose the clerkship was helpful.

LA replies:

But doesn’t this tend to support the liberal view that criminals are so stupid (or mentally ill) that they cannot be considered to have sufficient mentality to be aware of and responsible for the criminal nature of their acts?

Kevin V. replies:

This is a very good question, as it gets to the heart of the matter. Let me respond by making three points:

First, there is a point of diminished mental capacity where criminal intent is not possible and, thus, the actor cannot be held criminally responsible for his acts. The old Common Law rule on point, the M’Naghten Rule, was simple, to the point, sensible, and just. It stated:

the jurors ought to be told in all cases that every man is presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary be proved to their satisfaction; and that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

Despite some jurisdictions twisting this quite a bit, this is one instance where the old common law rule has largely held up, even during our modern, “enlightened” times.

Second, a mere lack of intelligence does not render a person incapable of knowing the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or not knowing it was wrong. While such a person is many times more likely to act on his criminal impulse, this does not touch upon the central question of understanding the act. In the horrific Houston case, we had a black women steal a child, then shoot the child’s mother, then run the mother over with a car. In each instance, even if she is of very poor intelligence, she knows what she is doing. She is not, for example, attempting to save the baby from the many-tentacled monster she saw in the parking lot trying to eat a tiny baby.

Third, accepting both points above, there is some point at which diminished capacity—that is to say, low intelligence—runs from a person’ who is dim-witted but still a knowing and moral actor, to a person who is truly unable to know right from wrong. As with all grey lines, there will be sharp disagreement over where that line should be drawn. By attempting to confuse two very different concepts—that the truly insane cannot and do understand what they are doing, and that the deeply unintelligent cannot understand the consequences of what they are doing, both to themselves and their victims—the ever-present pro-criminal lobby seeks to de-legitimize the criminal law.

Of course, such an enterprise is doomed to failure. Either they will not succeed, in which case they remain the current nuisance they are, while we go about our business of locking up dangerous criminals or putting them to death, or they succeed, in which case the chaos and license they would thus unleash would cause a reaction that would make today’s “draconian” penal law seems like the good old days.

Thomas Bertonneau writes:

Regarding the stupidity of criminals, it is mirrored by the stupid mendacity of political prosecutors, like Angela Corey.

Cain asked mendaciously, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God’s response was not, “Cain is retarded, therefore he is not criminally responsible”; it was that Cain was responsible, hence liable to punishment and atonement.

Chris K. writes:

In a sane society the fact that almost all criminals are irredeemably stupid would radically change the way we sentence criminals. If criminals are too stupid to understand the results of their actions, and if they do not posses the ability to change their behavior, the only just result for the rest of society is the immediate execution of convicted murderers and other violent criminals. There is no hope of rehabilitating the like of Verna McClain or Tyrone Woodfork. The only positive outcome I can see of the racial outrages of the past year is that white people are waking up to the fact that murderers and other extremely violent criminals must be executed in order for society to be safe. And since blacks commit many more homicides and are far more violent than other racial groups, this will mean that a disproportionate percentage of the people executed will be black.

Paul T. writes:

Examples abound. One of my favorites (alas, I don’t have a reference, but you may remember it) concerned a terrorist who rented a van for use on a mission and was caught afterwards when he returned it to the leasing company to recover his deposit. Message to terrorist chieftans: don’t scrimp on the expense account!

Beth M. writes:

There will always be hard cases in which it will be difficult to draw the line, but in this case, the perpetrator knew how to drive a car, had a fiance and apparently her own apartment. If you are truly retarded, you should have a guardian. If you are managing your own funds (from whatever source,) registered to vote, eligible for jury duty, swipin’ your own EBT, managing your own health care and raising your own children, then you should be held responsible for your violent acts. I would cut stupid people a lot of slack on white collar felonies, like income tax screwups, because the tax code is so complex that even smart people can’t figure it out. But snatching a baby and pulling a trigger are DIFFERENT.

If you are so dumb and confused that you didn’t understand that pulling the trigger of a gun could cause death, how is it that you happened to take a loaded gun with you? Why not just take some iced tea and Skittles when you went baby-hunting?

Chris K. writes:

Is there solution to black violence other than large scale executions? Perhaps if there is a sufficiently painful punishment for her evil behavior Fellony Silas might be salvageable as a human being. I doubt our stupid criminal justice system will punish her sufficiently to get the point across. More than likely, she will get off lightly and continue to act in an ever more criminal matter until she robs, maims, or kills someone. Is there any politically viable solution to black violence, short of executions and incarceration?

April 19

Robert R. writes:

The Woodlands (not the Woodlands) is a master-planned community opened in 1974 that has now grown to about 95,000, as people seek to escape the dysfunction of Houston proper. It is surrounded by many smaller once-rural towns and unincorporated neighborhoods, and the news media just says “The Woodlands” when someone is from one of those surrounding areas. In this case, the victim lived in Spring, five to ten miles outside The Woodlands, and the murderer lived in an unincorporated neighborhood just north of Houston, and about five miles south of Spring. The hospital that the victim was taken to is actually in The Woodlands. I don’t know where the actual crime took place but it may have been near the hospital, as there are the usual medical professional buildings surrounding it. What little crime is committed by actual residents of The Woodlands is usually done by apartment dwellers, and more specifically, by the children of residents whose rent is subsidized by the federal government.

David B. writes:

In this thread (http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/022215.html#stupidity) on the abduction of the infant after his mother’s murder, Kevin V. mentioned the only capital case he was exposed to as a law clerk.

Two German girls were hitch-hiking the American West and were raped and murdered by two drunken young white men who went to a bar and told everybody about it. Kevin V. writes that both are now on death row.

Could you ask Kevin V. for the names of the killers and when and where it happened? In my experience of studying and following trials, it is easier to put white criminals on death row in cases like this than blacks.

For example, the two white killers of the Petit family in Connecticut were put on death row recently in a state that was about to outlaw the death penalty. In contrast, only one of the four defendants in the Christian-Newsom torture-murders received the death penalty. This case is going to be retried and I doubt if there will be a death sentence this time.